Ravitch Warms to Tuckerism: Can Randi Be Far Ahead?

I posted the other day on the new (old) Tuckerism that Joe Nocera was promoting (again) in the New York Times.  

Obviously, Tucker's THL (Testing Hysteria Lite) has resonated with the neolibs as a way to stave off the revolution against testing, while preserving its worst features and maintaining the attack on collective bargaining and due process.  

Here is a key Tucker conclusion tucked into his report:


In the most facile and misleading way, Diane Ravitch has posted a select few points of the new old Tuckerism that Tucker and the Hillaryites obviously want Ravitch readers to know.  She clips them directly from Tucker's summary:

Here are his key points:

“The ideas outlined by Marc Tucker in Fixing Our National Accountability System signify a departure from conventional thinking on the issue of accountability. Rather than focus on punishing teachers for the results of a system that others designed, the core components of this report rest on three fundamental principles:

1) Testing: Instead of testing all of our students every year with low-quality tests, students would take high-quality accountability tests, covering a full core curriculum, only three times in their school career. In some off years, tests in math and ELA would be administered only to samples of students by computer and would not carry high stakes for teachers or students.

2) Use of Data: Data from these tests would be used to identify schools that might be in trouble, and to deploy a team of expert educators to assist in resolving the issues with the help of districts and/or states. This data would be available to the general public but it would not include a rank or grade.

3) Policies for Professionals: Enact policies that make it attractive for our nation’s strongest teachers and principals to work in the most at-risk schools – these very same policies would also make teaching an attractive career for some of our best high school graduates and transform teaching into a high status profession.”

Here are a few captures from the report, itself.  I suggest you read the whole thing.  I will be posting on it soon.

Let's begin with what Tucker wants to do with the test scores that will continue to central to his next generation of doing more of the same:

And, finally, the ultimate rationale for another generation of testing, sorting, monocultural thinking, teacher bashing, and central planning by businessmen:

 The saddest part about all this is that it perpetuates the false notion that schools, alone, can solve educational inequality or low national test scores.  Educational inequality is simply a reflection of the deeper inequalities that are getting worse the as we continue we ignore them.